By Shreyans Parekh, Senior Manager of
Product and Solutions Marketing, AppDynamics, a Cisco company
When it comes to cloud adoption, timelines are
not what they used to be. For most
organizations, transitions to the cloud followed a slow, gradual process with a
well-planned, long-term roadmap. However, with the emergence of the COVID-19
pandemic and subsequent mass migration to remote work, many businesses have
seen their cloud transitions accelerate rapidly with IT timelines shortened
significantly. A recent Gartner report predicted that, while overall IT
spending is set to decline in 2020, cloud computing is expected to grow by 19
percent, primarily brought on by this drastic increase in remote work.
With this surge in cloud usage, many of the
strategies companies used before are now accelerated to a rapid pace, with
massive changes happening faster than ever. In the recent AppDynamics Agents of Transformation 2020 Report,
95 percent of surveyed
organizations had to change their technology priorities as a result of the
COVID-19 pandemic. As priorities change, organizations have to pivot their
cloud strategies accordingly. Such rapid change can leave greater room for error,
ultimately translating to negative effects on the end user.
Enter
cloud monitoring.
As we operate in a world that's increasingly
digital and remote experiences become a regular fixture in all facets of life,
it's imperative that organizations implement monitoring solutions sooner rather
than later. A targeted cloud monitoring
solution incorporated into an organization's overall strategy can provide a
safety net and cost limit for companies that are shifting significant portions
of their infrastructure into the cloud and help technologists ensure the proper
health of that infrastructure once the migration is complete.
Unfortunately, that's not the current state
for many. Another recent Gartner report forecasted that by 2021, fewer than 15 percent of
organizations will have holistic monitoring solutions in place.
This lack of adequate monitoring will put more than $255 billion worth of
investments in cloud-based solutions at risk, which means all those hours and
efforts spent on shifting operations to the cloud could come crashing down,
leaving missed opportunities and problems unresolved.
Without the appropriate visibility and insights,
cloud projects can quickly get out of hand, especially with multiple diverse
cloud environments and thousands of applications being deployed. Cloud
monitoring solutions provide organizations with the needed transparency into
their environments and allow them to maintain control over their cloud journey
at every step of the process.
AIOps
offers a huge advantage.
To enable the most effective cloud monitoring
results, organizations should consider solutions that incorporate AI for
Operations, or the practice of AIOps. Earlier this year, my AppDynamics
colleague, Regional CTO Gregg Ostrowski, shared that leveraging AIOps would become broadly accepted and
critical to keeping key applications running flawlessly through automated
scaling, optimization and remediation in 2020. As
it turns out, his prediction would be validated in ways few realized: the
COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on the way we all work now has changed AIOps
from a blip on a past roadmap into a near-term and future necessity.
In addition to experiencing accelerated
timelines, almost two thirds (64 percent) of technologists are now being asked to perform tasks and
activities they have never done before, the Agents of Transformation
Report also found. New
responsibilities turn into new pressures, compounding the usual stressors of
handling the day-to-day of enterprise IT. These pressures can break down the
much-needed efficiencies between IT and business counterparts, which is crucial
for aligning on an IT strategy that is realistic and supports the business.
The
integration of AIOps into an organization's cloud monitoring efforts allows AI and
machine learning to handle baseline operations, such as addressing outages and
increasing uptime through real-time monitoring, so technologists can fully
focus their energy, efforts and expertise on solving the new issues that will
inevitably arise with a more distributed group of users and technologies.
Most
organizations understand the value of the cloud and are putting huge
investments, both in dollars and in technologists' time and energy, into moving
their operations to the cloud to ensure future flexibility and scalability. Leveraging AIOps is a key way to protect
these investments so an
organization is capable of not just weathering the storm of 2020, but flourishing
beyond it.
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About the Author
Shreyans Parekh is Senior Manager of
Products and Solutions Marketing at AppDynamics, part of Cisco, where he
manages corporate development and go-to-market strategy across the Cisco
applications, data center cloud and compute portfolio.